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Is SOX Compliance Pushing Companies out of the US? The Duke of York’s Speach at Nano TX Conference

On the final day of the nanoTX conference here in Dallas last week, HRH the Duke of York, KG, KCVO, stopped by to give a speach. The Duke has been serving Great Britain as a sort of ambassador for business and industry, and it was in this capacity that he spoke to the Nano TX attendees. He had earlier in the day visited the Lockheed-Martin plant in Arlington to inspect the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 jet, which he described as being chocked full of mind-blowing technologies.

He went on to speak of the promise inherent in nanotechnology, and he spoke glowingly of Great Britain’s role in the advancement of business and technology while partnering with the United States and other countries. He noted that one of the co-discoverers of Buckminsterfullerene (aka “Bucky-balls”, a nano-scale structure of carbon atoms in a geodesic-style polyhedron), was British.

The really interesting thing that the Duke said was how the UK was committed to making it easy for businesses to function there. He specifically mentioned how they worked to keep paperwork an bureaucracy to a minimum for the sake of being good for businesses.

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 10/02/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (1) | Comments RSS | Filed under: General, technology future, Futurism, nano, nanotech, sarbanes-oxley, SOx

Dr. Paul W.K. Rothemund and Dr. Eric Winfree awarded the Feynman Prize at nanoTX Conference

Dr. Paul W.K. Rothemund and Dr. Eric Winfree were awarded the 2006 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes at the nanoTX Conference last week, at a special awards reception. (I earlier blogged about H. Ross Perot’s keynote address at this conference.)

Rothemund was on-hand to receive the award, and I was fortunate to be able to attend his presentation on his and Winfree’s research. Rothemund delivered first a presentation on his work, and then he delivered a presentation on behalf of Winfree who could not attend.

Rothemund’s work is fantastic — he works upon Algorithmic Self-Assembly. He’s been able to program long strands of viral DNA such than when mixed in a suspension with other short DNA snippets (and heated slightly), the snippets or “staples” will bind to the long strand in particular order, causing it to fold back upon itself to form precise shapes. Rothemund has nicknamed what he does as “DNA Origami”, although the key concept is the ability to program the DNA to order itself into near two-dimensional, or even three-dimensional shapes. As proof of concept, Rothemund has programmed DNA to fold itself into words, stars, smiley faces, and other shapes.

Smiley composed of one long DNA strand
The staple snippets of DNA are not shown in this representation.
(Illustration copyright 2006 by Chris Silver Smith.)